Intervention into the Data Center Paris 19

A week ago we put into production a new file server SANDY 2. This is a SUN x4540 server supplied with 48 hard disk drives with new disk controllers. This server works wonders; it’s very quick and speeds up your website.

Now there remain just some services stored at his “little brother” Sandy: a SUN x4500 server that also has 48 hard disk drives, but which is a previous-generation server. We will completely reformat this server, as it has encountered some performance problems during these last 2 months. We will use this operation to introduce a very new SSD-based system.

Instead of writing and reading directly to the hard drives we will use a group of disk buffers (Intel SSD). The SSDs (flash memory-based) highly improve reading and writing of small files that a website contains (images, microchips, buttons etc.).

We will create 2 groups of SSDs, one for SLC-based writing and a group of MLC-based disk buffers. We are waiting for a factor x40 at the performance level of the file server.

We will test this new procedure during one month. If it’s as reliable and efficient as we think, we’ll add this new system to Sandy2.

Due to these servers we can increase our storage capacity up to 160 To, and above all we’ll have high-performance file servers. Hopefully, before the end of the year we could shorten the page generation time down to 100 milliseconds.

Just for your information, until now the values of dynamic pages generation have been equal to 140-200 ms (which is already excellent).

Beyond the high display speed we manage to serve more pages with the same electric power, which means that your websites eat up less energy.
At WMaker the rate of hardware update is very high: during these last years we’ve been changing the hardware every year and half (according to advancements in hardware energetic performance).

We have a lot of reasons to do this:

-We care about our environmental impact.
-We like experiments with new technologies.
-It’s an economical decision as energy is very expensive in the data center (700€/month for 10 A).

Normally, this operation should not cause any interruption. Still, if our team must carry out a short break at night, we’ll notice you about it 1 or 2 hours beforehand in your back office.